Posted by:
Cold-Dodger
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Date: January 19, 2021 04:52AM
I suppose one would want to be remembered by one’s children but I have no children and am not planning to for now. I thought maybe it mattered to be seen and remembered as someone that stood for what they thought was true, even if that differed from one era of his life to the next.
Questions like these are contaminated from the get-go by everything the church ever taught me to think about posterity and records and legacies and grand plans. I was going to be known among posterity or at least in the church as someone who stood for what he was taught —- but what I was taught turned out to be stupid as fuck and obviously wrong to anyone who makes the minimal effort to research it.
So, I entered my atheist phase. Perhaps I could at least be remembered as the man who worshipped the truth, forgive him if he was mistaken from time to time about what it was precisely. Maybe I could be an apostle of rationality and tolerance and channel my former energies into that vein. What for, though? It comes out of this need, this urge, this drive that emerges from the thought that I’m going to be remembered for something great down the line and I’d better make it good. But remembered by whom? And why do I care?
If I’m being honest with myself, I never cared who my distant dead relatives were. Unless they had some interaction with a man (such as Smith) who I was utterly enamored by, they (their names, their faces, and the particulars of their lives) didn’t matter to me. I felt guilty about offending the “spirit of Elijah” thus, but not enough to make me read any of their old letters or diaries. I come from pioneer stock, so there’s plenty of written thoughts they left behind.
I was building quite a written corpus of my own before the shelf collapsed thinking it would matter to someone someday. I kept a journal before my mission and I kept one religiously during my mission. I filled four thick volumes just in my mission. It slowed down after the mission, because everything I’d learned about the church and everything I’d ever struggled with mental health-wise came to a head and the narrow way I’d been raised had no answers for me. The pressure pushed me on to eventually abandon my received faith and seek answers in the liberal/secular world I’d always despised, not because I actually hated it but because I’d been taught to. We just despise that world. That’s what we do; that’s how our posterity will remember us —- we lived “in the World”, but we were not “of the World”. I loathed it with sad reluctance, admiring many parts of it but knowing I couldn’t love it like I wanted to. I had duties.
I can’t tell with words how utterly traumatic it was to me to be a typical young man and a devout Mormon, a wanker who couldn’t keep the commandments of God. If I couldn’t kick my dirty habit once and for all, how would I be remembered? It’s from that dark place of anxiety and torment that much of my young devoutness sprang forth. The fire of my testimony was fueled by the torments from which I yearned for a final release of some kind, for which I kept looking forward to Mormon Jesus and the LDS church for redemption.
Much of what I wrote in my journals and in my letters home was self-deceptive. I never committed my darker thoughts to paper. I never described the well-spring of torment, the way I talked to myself in my own head on a daily basis, that drove me to care about religion to a degree that most other kids don’t figure out until certain experiences they have on their missions. I arrived in the Midwest already having read the scriptures, already knowing what I was doing there, already knowing the Lord, just not feeling worthy of any of it despite bearing my soul often to my leaders and hearing them tell me it was fine. I didn’t believe them. How could it be fine after all I had read about worthiness and righteousness? What about how I felt most of the time? We were chosen to come forth as souls in the plan of redemption at this time in the history because we could handle it, right? Well, then, what was wrong with me?
I burned my journals last year. And my letters written to me on the mission from others. See, I couldn’t look at them after I got home. I wanted to build this version of my life where I lived a Mormon dream and was worthy of it. It was exhausting, yet I genuinely wanted it. But I got home, and everything inside of me just buckled under the weight. I couldn’t do it anymore. I didn’t cast it all aside, though, I just put it on the back burner expecting to come back to it. I put those letters in shoeboxes and taped them shut. I left my journals at the bottom of my piles of books thinking someday I’d pick them up again. It’s been five years since I used my college experience to kill the externalization and personification of my negative self-talk that I called my “Lord,” and flipping through those journals recently repulsed me. I was never deliberately dishonest in them, but it’s obviously a young man seeking to delude himself by any means necessary because he’s scared of how he will be remembered if he doesn’t. Perhaps I ought to have kept them to contrast my thoughts against them later in life, but I’d rather just forget as much possible and move on. Those journals were the voice of a very isolated young man thinking other people’s thoughts. The only interesting part of it to me were the hints of my internal struggle that shined through here and there, which were also glimpses of a developing independent mind. But again, I’d just rather forget it. No one who I could have sat down with and talked those journals over with in this life in a way that mattered to my quest for inner peace gives a shit or has any mind to help me achieve it. They’re determined to remember me evilly, no matter what I wrote in my journals, because they either want to recover me through shame or they don’t want be treated by other Mormons the way they treat me.
All the former words I have spoken building up this cult are ash in my mouth. I regret it. I regret not rebelling sooner. I regret not getting to know my two other brothers before the cult took them and sealed its hold on them. I’m glad I repented of this before Chief got suckered into serving his mission and suffered a fate similar perhaps to what other closest gay missionaries have endured. I am grateful that at least he remembers me fondly. It feels good to be well-regarded, when people tell heroic stories about you at least to themselves.
But what does that matter after I’m long gone? I believe that consciousness will cease upon brain death and it will never exist again. I have these years of life to enjoy human connections. I suppose record keeping of the kind that mormons love is a form of simulated human connection. You’re connecting with people you never met and yet believe will exist someday, and you hope maybe they will care to hear about what was important to you. Some people pray to their ancestors, and some people write journals to their descendants. It serves a similar function, probably. But neither the dead nor the unborn can hear you. The unborn may read your words one day, but the reason you wrote it in your life was for the rush of endorphins of having a simulated connection with someone who wasn’t actually ever there. We pray to God for the same reason. You won’t exist anymore by the time they’re going through your shit, and you won’t be there to receive any benefit from watching it benefit them.
The reason for writing, I now believe, is for you. If you don’t benefit from it, then who cares? Your posterity won’t. Emily Dickenson wrote a treasure trove of poetry that never saw the light of day in her lifetime. She wrote poetry for herself, because it was fun and because the words she wrote were truly felt. Maybe she enjoyed the simulated relationship she had with her future reader. This perhaps can be valuable if you’re being authentic with them, those future readers I mean. Mormons waste so much of their spiritual energies on maintaining appearances for reasons of anxiety, and they rob themselves thereby. All the flowery self-deceptive literature that the cult faithful have accumulated is worthless. They’re telling us to believe something that we don’t believe anymore and know to be false. They’re trying to convince themselves as they try to convince us of something preposterous, and we can tell. There’s no value in that.